Bryan W. Van Norden

On his book Taking Back Philosophy: A Multicultural Manifesto

Cover Interview of December 10, 2017

The wide angle

The late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia
once dismissed the teachings of Confucius as “the mystical aphorisms of the
fortune cookie.” In doing so, he was expressing the perspective of a long line
of conservative thinkers who think that “so-called philosophy” outside the West
is nothing but shallow platitudes. For example, in his bestselling The
Closing of the American Mind, Allan Bloom claimed that contemporary
colleges and universities were corrupting the morals of their students by
undermining their faith in the classic texts of Western civilization.

In contrast, Taking Back Philosophy: A
Multicultural Manifesto argues that education must become multicultural in
order to maintain its contemporary relevance. China is an increasingly
important geopolitical power, and President Xi Jinping routinely praises
Confucian philosophers. In India, the dominant political party espouses a
version of Hindu nationalism, grounded in classical Vedanta philosophy. The US
population is increasingly ethnically diverse, and within a few decades whites
of European descent will be a minority. Can we afford not to learn about
philosophy outside the European tradition?

I got a PhD in Chinese philosophy from
Stanford University in 1991. Since then, I have been fighting to convince my
colleagues to teach Chinese and other non-European philosophies. I have given
carefully argued examples of the sophistication of Chinese philosophy. I have
provided model course guides and reading lists. I have run informational
sessions at conferences. A handful of institutions, like Vassar College, where
I have taught for 20 years, and Yale-NUS College in Singapore, where I am
currently teaching, have been open to multicultural philosophy. However, most
have not. The vast majority of philosophers have simply ignored the irrefutable
evidence for the existence and high quality of Chinese, Indian, African, and
Indigenous American philosophy. I hope that my fellow philosophers will read my
book and finally be convinced. But if they are not, I think it is time for
students and the general public to demand a multicultural approach to
philosophy.

The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.Jerome Kagan, Interview of September 17, 2009

[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.Carolyn J. Dean, Interview of February 01, 2011